Within every living thing there is a tug of war, consisting of the the
pull towards life, and the pull towards death. The life urge is
conservative, the death urge expansive.

Life is defined by the process of limitation; a thing is only a thing
because of all the things it is not; from a sea of infinite possibility
certain characteristics are chosen, at the expense of others. Infinity
is bounded.

Death is the return to infinity; the unbounding of what has been bound.
If life is synonymous with 'limited', then death is synonymous with
'unlimited.'

As humans we have an urge towards expansiveness - the need to constantly
explore new territory - that must be balanced by the imposition of
limits. A lack of boundaries allows us to adventure to far flung places,
full of mystery and novelty - but whenever we travel to extremes we
also dance with death.

Dumont: No. My thinking was that today's spectator is so well-versed in film language that all theories about suspense, as argued by Dreyer and Hitchcock, on what makes you scared in cinema, can be ditched.

It's the spectator, finally, who's going to construct the menace and the fear.

In Twentynine Palms because supposedly nothing is happening, it's impossible, something has to happen. What I discovered during the editing was that a dramatic tension emerged [between the scenes] that hadn't been there during the shooting.

indieWIRE: Yes, but that's partly the result of your very precise mise-en-scene.

Dumont: Maybe, but the more elaborate your narrative, the more the spectator shuts up and listens obediently. And if the filmmaker keeps quiet, the spectator will himself project his own assumptions and sentiments onto the screen.

At the broadest
level of description, variation in human personality appears to reflect
engagement and restraint of behavior.

The first metatrait ['Stability'] is thought to relate to the need
to maintain a stable organization of behavioral and psychological
function.

The second metatrait ['Plasticity'] has been hypothesized to relate to an individual’s basic need to incorporate novel information from the environment.These two metatraits have been theoretically linked to the functioning of the serotonergic and dopaminergic neurotransmitter systems, respectively.

Serotonin is a broadly functioning neuromodulator with regulatory or inhibiting effects on mood, behavior, and cognition [...] its widespread projections act to limit negative affect and aggression while maintaining behavioral and motivational stability [...] a review of research on serotonin and personality found the most consistent association to be between greater serotonin function and greater impulse control.

Dopamine is also a broadly functioning neuromodulator, but with primarily activating effects on behavior and cognition.

A sexual organism must divide its total
reproductive investment into two—competing for mates and caring for
offspring. Almost from the dawn of sexual reproduction, one sex
specialized slightly more in competing for mates and the other slightly
more in caring for offspring. This was because only one sex was able to
inherit the mitochondria (the powerhouse of cells); so that sex started
out with sex cells larger and more resource-rich than the other sex.

And
thus began the great divide into fat, resource-laden eggs, already
investing in "caring"—providing for offspring—and slim, streamlined
sperm, already competing for that vital investment. Over evolutionary
time, this divergence widened, proliferating and amplifying, in every
sexually reproducing species that has ever existed.

So the differences
go far beyond reproductive plumbing. They are distinctive adaptations
for the different life-strategies of competers and carers. Wherever
ancestral males and females faced different adaptive problems, we should
expect sex differences—encompassing bodies, brains and behaviour. And
we should expect that, reflecting those differences, competers and
carers will have correspondingly different life-priorities.

And that's
why, from that initial asymmetry, the same characteristic differences
between males and females have evolved across all sexually-reproducing
animals, differences that pervade what constitutes being male or female.